Re: [Usability] Merge Open/Save (was "Re: Save Icon")

[Alexey Rusakov <ktirf users sf net>]

Kirk Bridger wrote:
> Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
>
> > On 9 Feb, 2006, at 1:36 AM, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> > > ...
> > > What about "save because there might be a power cut"? Or "save 
> > > because I'm going to make a coffee and my cat might jump on the 
> > > keyboard"? or just "save because I'm paranoid about crashes"?
> > > ...
> >
> > Those are excellent examples of why saving should be something done 
> > automatically by the computer, not by humans. The computer will always 
> > remember to save; the human won't.
> But the computer can't tell that the cat typed the last few paragraphs 
> of text, and so it should not be saved automatically.  Perhaps the cat 
> moved the cursor after adding a few letters here are there, and the 
> owner never notices it.  Auto-save kind of adds work for the user in 
> this case.
If we have unlimited Undo, this is easily fixable, if you see something 
happened with your data. The owner may never notice the changes regardless 
of how "Save" is implemented. At last, the cat can accidentally press "Save" :)
The user data is sacred, but a computer can't determine, which user's data 
is really sacred. I'd prefer to lock the keyboard, rather than try to 
determine, which data to save.

> If we want a user to feel confident that the contents of a file are 
> always going to be exactly what they expect, we need to leave the saving 
> to the user.
No.

  We can add in recovery things like auto-save of temporary
> versions, but ultimately I wouldn't think a user would want the software 
> deciding what's savable in their documents.
Exactly! That's what I'm saying about. And I believe software should save 
everything. A user will find out what he needs and what he doesn't.

--
  Alexey "Ktirf" Rusakov